There were mulberry limbs twined with mimosa branches leaning close
to the back door. Stretching, I could barely reach the fruit hanging high above a
narrow path. Mulberries for breakfast, mulberries with lunch, our teeth stained
that whole week. Each of us believed the other was dreaming. Imagination
wasn’t necessary. Late afternoons we took the small, crooked side streets
leading to the harbor, passing scrolled awnings and furled flags, porches
intaglioed by purple morning glories. A raft of eider ducks with their black bellies
and white backs visible from the bleached wharf. It was July 4th, nearing dusk,
when we joined the promenade up Commercial Street. Couples arm-in-arm: men
with men, women with women, women with men. The smell of mud at low tide. A
street musician played a Bach suite on her viola, an elegantly dressed woman
sang from Carmen in faulty French. Down one clamshell alleyway, I thought I
heard a bobwhite’s whistled call, perhaps answering those first explosions. Long
Point Light and Pilgrim Monument always in the distance, the mast of the
schooner, Rose Dorothea, threatening to rise through the library steeple. And at
every open space between crowded shops, at every corner, fireworks erupting.
The childrens’ moon at first quarter as the sun dropped lower. Already the days
beginning to shorten. Once we reached the West End breakwater, we forgot
everything. That’s what we told each other. Imagination wasn’t necessary. Each
of us believing the other was dreaming. Then we swung round and strolled back,
stopping in a painter’s studio where a show was being hung. The artist said, I
don’t want to know what I’m painting. But every move she’d made had intention,
every step we took, the bleeding berries, bobwhite calling its mate, light tumbling
off runged constellations, each star in the ladder tipping over, spilling song, filling
the darkness that finally stretches over land’s end, the bursting flame over half
the world.